John Adamson
reviews Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century
Courtesans by Virginia Rounding

It is not
often when reviewing that I discover that I have stayed in the house of one of
the leading characters, particularly when she happens to have been a prostitute
- albeit, I hasten to add, one at the very top of her profession. The house in
question is number 25, Avenue des Champs Elysées - now the Paris Travellers'
Club - which offers its hospitality to assorted visiting diplomats, monsignori,
and the occasional Cambridge don (hence my own entrée), but once the pleasure
ground of a distinctly racier set.

Built for "La
Paiva", a Russian-born Jewish brothel-girl who became the most celebrated
Parisian temptress of her age, this vast hotel particulier, with its
alabaster staircase and Boucher-style ceiling paintings of libidinous nymphs and
shepherds, stands as a monument to the social standing (and flashy wealth) that
could be achieved by a successful courtesan. It still evokes the louche,
sexually permissive upper-class demi-monde that reached its apogee in the 1850s
and 1860s, a world that formed a sort of parallel universe that existed beside
mainstream, polite society.

Men, of
course, could move between these two societies, maintaining separate personas in
each: pious pater familias in one, raffish adulterer in the other. For women,
however, it was another matter. Movement between the two was only in one
direction. Once a woman had become a demi-mondaine (a term first popularised in
1855 by Alexandre Dumas fils), either because of divorce or sexual scandal, or
the need to sell her favours for money, there was no route of re-entry into
polite society.

On the other
hand, by exploiting their looks, charm, and favours, a small elite of these
women could acquire a measure of influence, financial independence and (ironically)
sexual freedom that was denied to their more respectable, married sisters.

This book
examines the careers of four of them: Marie Duplessis, the consumptive beauty
who formed the model for Dumas's Lady of the Camelias (and hence of Verdi's La
Traviata); Apollonie Sabatier, a muse to Flaubert and Baudelaire; and the
English-born Cora Pearl, the mistress of Napoleon III's eponymous cousin, the
portly, irascible Prince Napoleon - as well as the worldly marquise de Paiva.

Of course,
these indulged and affluent "courtesans" were merely the pinnacle of vast
pyramid of transactions in which money changed hands in return for sex (or
sometimes merely companionship). Most of that pyramid was occupied by
common-or-garden prostitution, an area where the French had decided that, if
vice could not be eradicated, then at least it should be controlled. From the
early 19th century, as Virginia Rounding notes, prostitutes in France were, for
the most part, registered and subjected to regular medical checks, and brothels
(the euphemistically named maisons de tolerance) were supervised by the
state.

It was this
tolerance that made the world of the courtesan possible. As Rounding explains,
affluent courtesans became celebrities, enjoying an elevated (if ambiguous)
social position. There was nothing furtive, still less dangerous, about these
illicit upper-class liaisons. Nor was the relation wholly, or even primarily, to
do with sex. The courtesan held court, not in her boudoir, but in her salon. And
while these salons were not without their sexual frisson, they fulfilled a
variety of other roles, not least as forums for political and literary debate.

During the
1850s, for example, the celebrated Apollonie Sabatier kept a salon on the rue
Frochot, not only avidly frequented by Flaubert and Baudelaire, but also by a
string of other lesser lights. Yet, in general, she remained faithful to Alfred
Mosselman (the man who paid her bills), posing as an object of unattainable
desire to her entourage of the literary lubricious.

Unlike the
world of the bordello, where sexual grati fication was immediately available,
the salon of the courtesan derived part of its allure from the discri mination
with which its femme fatale dispensed her favours. Flaubert's letters to
Apollonie, in consequence, are full of unfulfilled fantasies and longings, not
least (with his fetishist interest in feet) his unfulfilled desire to make "obscene
caresses" - whatever these may be - in the eyelets of Apollonie's boots.

The relative
fidelity of Apollonie Sabatier, however, seems to have been something of an
exception among Ms Rounding's quartet of great horizontales. Most were not only
selectively "available", but also keen to use their availability as a route to
acquiring wealth. The youthful Marie Duplessis, for example, died in her early
twenties surrounded by all the fine jewels, clothes and furnishings of an
affluent member of an haute bourgeoisie. And most courtesans proved themselves
adept at exploiting the rivalries between their admirers.

But, even
among the most venal, there were accepted bounds to cupidity. The extravagance
of La Paiva, who gained a reputation for bringing young men to financial ruin in
order to fund her already ostentatious lifestyle, was thought to have gone too
far. She was ubiquitously vilified. (On one occasion, she is alleged to have
extorted a fee of 12,000 Francs for her services from an impoverished but
besotted admirer, only to burn the notes in his presence during the course of
their tryst.)

Pampered,
vain, manipulative and occasionally tragic figures though these women were - a
complexity finely delineated by Ms Rounding - they possessed an almost heroic
confidence that made them exceptional among their sex.

There are
numerous examples, but none beats that of Cora Pearl, who became the talk of
Paris when, with no training for the stage and still less as a singer, she
undertook the exacting cameo role of Cupid (appropriately enough) in Offenbach's
Orpheus in the Underworld. She appeared before an audience of noblemen "in white
gloves and holding ivory lorgnettes", confident in the knowledge that whatever
the deficiencies of her voice, she would conquer all with a costume that
consisted of nothing more than a few strategically placed and very expensive
jewels.

John Adamson
is a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge

Lives
and loves of the serial mistress (Filed: 23/06/2003)

Rupert Christiansen reviews Grandes Horizontales by Virginia
Rounding

The phenomenon of the Parisian courtesan is one of the more
amusing mythologies of the 19th century, an erotic fantasy largely created by
men who wanted to characterise Louis Napoleon's Second Empire as decadent. No
story about the shamelessly rapacious antics of the grandes horizontales was too
far-fetched to be believed, and the moral was never far away: read Zola's novel
Nana or Frédéric Loliée's Les Femmes du Second Empire, and you will be left with
a shocking but enthralling picture of thousands of high-spending, sexually
rampaging beauties moving inexorably towards syphilis and ruin.

The truth is less lurid. Some courtesans were doubtless no more
than expensive hookers, many of them working-class girls raped as children and
subsequently barred from respectability. But others look more like free spirits,
deserving respect for their resilience, independence and refusal to kowtow to
the mercenary and hypocritical aspects of the institution of marriage. They
belong as much to the history of the déclassé - a category embracing the
divorced, separated, victimised, abandoned and cussedly nonconformist - as they
do to the history of prostitution.

And they struck a problematic bargain. The courtesan, as
Virginia Rounding points out in this sober and intelligent study, sells far more
than the prostitute, "for she is not much interested in a one-off transaction,
involving only her body and only for an hour or so; the whole package she has to
offer is herself". Some of them steered this dangerous course more successfully
than others.

The most familiar and romantic (in both senses) story is that
of Marie Duplessis, born Alphonsine Plessis and commemorated by Dumas in La Dame
aux camélias and Verdi in La Traviata. Recent versions of her life by Pam Gems
and Neil Bartlett have reinterpreted her as an effing and blinding Essex girl,
but this was not the case: although she could be crazily vivacious, she was
emphatically not coarse. "She had received from God the kind of elegance and
distinction which would have made a great lady envious," wrote her obituarist. "Gracefulness
came as naturally to her as scent does to a flower." So did lying, a trait which
drove her lovers crazy.

Exploited by her father, this tiny, childlike creature of
obscure origins was picked up in her teens by the Duc de Guiche, who educated
and refined her into a well-read lady with superior manners and cultivated
conversation. Dumas's own liaison with her was brief, and the story he created
after her death was largely drawn from her longer relationship with the Comte de
Perrégaux, whom she eventually married. The camellias may well have been an
invention; the notion that she had an affair with Liszt is also dubious.

Tuberculosis took Marie Duplessis tragically young. Her coeval
Apollonie Sabatier, on the other hand, survived to become a dignified, elderly
spinster, the beneficiary of an income bequeathed by a grateful Richard Wallace,
the founder of the Wallace Collection. She was an artist's model and also
something of a literary muse: Baudelaire dedicated some of the poems in Les
Fleurs du Mal to her, and she became famous for her Sunday soirées, at which
Gautier, Flaubert and Delacroix felt free to talk dirty. "Courtesan" doesn't
seem a fair description of this charming woman; "serial mistress" might be
nearer the mark, though even that doesn't do justice to her capacity for
disinterested friendship with men.

La Païva was a much less sympathetic character. A Russian
Jewess of vaulting ambition, she was hard, cold, clever, calculating and greedy.
Having ensnared the hugely rich Silesian Count Henckel von Donnersmarck, she had
him build her a marble and onyx mansion in the Champs Elysées: the Goncourt
brothers recorded its staggering vulgarity in their diary. She died fat, but not
ruined or syphilitic.

These three are known largely through the report of men who
either idolised or reviled them. Of Cora Pearl, we have a somewhat more
objective picture, since she wrote her own candid, if unreliable, memoirs. Born
Emma Crouch of Plymouth and seduced at 14, she became the lover of two of the
Second Empire's most powerful men, the Emperor's cousin "Plon-Plon" Bonaparte,
and his right-hand man, the Duc de Morny. She wore too much make-up and dyed her
hair, but for all her gold-digging tartiness, she remained likeable - an
underworld guide to Parisian femmes galantes described her as a "jolly good
fellow".

Virginia Rounding has intelligently woven these four potted
biographies into a seamless narrative and framed them in a clearly drawn
historical context. But her approach is so doggedly unimaginative and
unspeculative that the result is strangely flat and mundane: stripped of their
legends and left shivering in the cold light of fact, the courtesans aren't
nearly as exciting as we thought they were.

Grandes
Horizontales by Virginia Rounding

Julie Wheelwright finds that the
famous courtesans of Paris
paid for independence with isolation

28 June 2003

There has
always been a thin line between the public and private performances of notorious
women. In 19th-century France, the nation's most highly paid mistresses - known
as courtesans - understood that the monetary value of their company was tied to
their reputation. Indeed, many worked hard at enhancing their own mythology,
often giving contradictory stories about their origins, egging their clients on
to ever greater excesses and even inspiring writers. Charles Beaudelaire's Les
Fleurs du Mal owed much to grande horizontale Apollonie Sabatier, while
Alexandre Dumas fils turned Marie Duplessis' life into legend in La Dame aux
camélias.

Virginia
Rounding's history of four courtesans does much to separate the gloss from the
fascinating realities. All her subjects were "fallen women" who understood that
once they entered the demi-monde, they could never again be respectable: "No
return journey was possible," she writes, "no matter what riches she might amass
or works of charity she might undertake." Yet the courtesan's world ran in
parallel to bourgeois society, with fashions often borrowing from both and the
ladies of twilight entertaining the most powerful men of France.

Among them was
Cora Pearl, an Englishwoman whose rape at a young age provided her with the
determination to use her sexual powers to gain the wealth that an impoverished
childhood had denied her. She arrived in Paris in the 1850s, worked her way up
to become mistress of the Duke de Morny, the Prince of Orange and "Jean-Jean",
Prince Napoleon. Invitations to her salon were sought-after. One admirer
described a dinner party where she "strewed orchids over the floor and dressed
as a sailor, danced the hornpipe, followed by a can-can". But privately, she
mourned the loneliness that came with her inability to enjoy real intimacy. For
her liaisons with the Prince at the Palais Royal, she often dined alone in a
room that his wife had vacated, served by the same butler. Through the walls,
she could hear the Princess Clotilde talking with their children, an intimacy
that embarrassed her.

Such
uncomfortable reminders of their state as outsiders was the price the courtesans
paid for their independence. Women like La Pavia, Russian wife of a Jewish
tailor, chose their clients, dictated their terms and could amass a fortune. La Pavia,
born Esther Pauline Lachmann, remade herself in Paris,
using her "prodigious powers of attraction" and exotic methods of seduction. She
found a wealthy marquess, blackmailed him into marriage, and once his fortune
began to wane, sent him abroad. In her forties, "painted and powdered like an
old tightrope-walker", she found another husband to finance a gruesomely opulent
palace famed for its portraits of her as much for its onyx staircase and bath.

If there
existed an archetype of the hard-hearted schemer, Dumas' literary portrait of
his lover Marie Duplessis gave rise to another interpretation of the courtesan's
life. Marie, who died young of consumption, was known to be pious, had a
reputation for good works and often gave away money and clothes. She was
immortalised as the fallen woman with a heart of gold. Rounding calls her "the
ideal illustration of what could happen to a vulnerable young girl on the
streets of Paris".
And there were hundreds of thousands at that time, who ended up with a similar
fate without having tasted the high life.

Although the
detail of courtesans' lives would in themselves make a good read, Rounding sets
their careers within the context of the financial expansion of 19th-century France
that fuelled such excesses. These were women ahead of their time, often grossly
exploited as girls, impoverished in middle age, but who enjoyed that rare
opportunity to earn their own money and live an unencumbered life.

Grandes Horizontales: The lives and legends of four 19th-century courtesans
by Virginia Rounding

Inhuman creatures: Matthew J Reisz admires an attempt to flesh out the lives
of Paris's vilified and adored courtesans

29 June 2003

Napoleon III's Second Empire (1852-70) was an era of frenzied, conspicuous
consumption which ended in tears, with France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian
War. Moralists shuddered gleefully over its depravities. Many focused particular
attention on the celebrated courtesans. Zola depicted his super-prostitute Nana
dying of consumption, "a shovelful of putrid flesh", the ultimate symbol of a
diseased nation. The younger Alexandre Dumas virtually invented "the tart with a
heart" in La Dame aux camélias, based on his affair with Marie Duplessis, but he
went on to write another play raving about decent society being undermined by "a
colossal Beast with seven heads and ten horns": prostitution.

This witty and stylish book explores the "legends" and heated fantasies about
four of the most famous grandes horizontales. Apollonie Sabatier, known as La
Présidente because she presided over a celebrated weekly literary salon, was for
years "kept" in style by a rich businessman. She inspired a famous statue, much
caressed by museum visitors, of a (naked) "Woman bitten by a snake" - and
seemingly brought to a spectacular orgasm. She received letters of wonderfully
po-faced obscenity from Flaubert and the poet Théophile Gautier: "I'm ready,
like a large King Charles' spaniel, to lick between your fingers and your
buttocks, and your gusset. I needn't mention the clitoris, that goes without
saying." Baudelaire worshipped her as a goddess and wrote some ethereal poems to
her but (reading through the lines of their fragmentary correspondence) seems to
have recoiled in horror when she offered to sleep with him.

Blanche de Païva was a Russian Jew who married a Portuguese marquess, left
him soon after and eventually got so rich she built a residence on the Champs
Elysées rivalling Prince Napoleon's neo-Pompeian palace nearby. Since she also
became the mistress of a leading Prussian dignitary, racism no doubt played a
part in the way she was portrayed. One observer thought "she resembled both an
automaton and a vampire".

Another told of the 10,000 francs she demanded from a young man who wanted to
sleep with her. Many also noted that her grand house was equipped with an
innovative central heating system but always kept very cold, as if she were
"some inhuman creature who had swept in from the frozen wastelands of Siberia,
cold-blooded, needing neither physical nor emotional warmth".

Rounding describes all this with panache and includes an excellent
introductory chapter on the classification and regulation of different types of
"loose women" in 19th-century France. Prostitutes, we learn, were registered and
compelled to submit to regular medical examination not on a table but on a sort
of reclining armchair, because many of them wore huge hats they didn't want to
squash. The book is full of such intriguing historical details.

What is more problematic is that Rounding also tries to find the real women
behind the stereotypes, to reclaim her quartet from the male fantasists
surrounding them. Sheer lack of evidence often makes this difficult. It is clear
that La Dame aux camélias is highly romanticised, but the personality and inner
life of Marie Duplessis, who died aged 23, remain highly elusive. (She may well
have cultivated such elusiveness.) Lists of lovers, and speculation about
whether a courtesan did or did not sleep with a long-forgotten artist, tell us
little in themselves.

Furthermore, Rounding ends her book on an odd note, praising La Païva's "drive"
and "business acumen", La Présidente's "gifts for friendship and putting guests
at their ease", as qualities which might have taken them far in an age offering
greater opportunities to women. This may be true, but it feels a bit
half-hearted and pious.

Fortunately, the final figure in the book, Cora Pearl, has a voice as well as
a reputation. Originally from Plymouth, she was celebrated for her skill at "pigeon
plucking" - relieving rich young men of their money - and her eye-catching
flamboyance. (She is said once to have been served up on a platter, naked except
for a few sprigs of parsley, and to have dyed her dog blue to match her dress.)
She was also rumoured to be so callous that she only worried about the blood
stains on the carpet when a poet tried to commit suicide in her presence.

Pearl's memoirs, written in the style of a music-hall romp, describe her
admirers, adventures and attempts to play her lovers off against each other (while
always keeping the richest on side). "As for what is conventionally termed blind
passion or fatal attraction, no!" she remarks cheerfully at one point. "Luckily
for my peace of mind and happiness, I have never known them." She alone emerges
from this book as a real - and very likeable - personality. Rounding never quite
manages to make any of the other three come alive enough to overshadow the gaudy
myths about them, but her account of their "legends" is highly entertaining.

Madames flutter byVirginia Rounding tells the story of four
courtesans in nineteenth-century France who had glamour and cash - and were the
first fashion victims in Grandes Horizontales

The myth of Paris has been embodied in women
of legendary sexual charm since the fifteenth century, Agnès Sorel, Diane de
Poitiers, Ninon l'Enclos and many others; women of dubious or even unknown
antecedents who achieved amazing social and cultural prestige in what was
otherwise one of the most misogynistic societies in Europe. The best-remembered
of these fabulous monsters are probably the courtesans of the fin de siècle
represented by Colette in Mes Apprentissages, Gigi and Chèri, but Virginia
Rounding looks here at the previous generation, the reigning beauties of the
Second Empire.

Her engaging book interweaves the stories of
four women: Marie Duplessis, (Alexandre Dumas's dame aux camélias), Apollonie
Sabatier, La Païva and Cora Pearl. Only two of the four even possessed the
sumptuously exaggerated curves then considered the ideal of female beauty.
Duplessis was slim and adolescent, Pearl was unfemininely athletic and La Païva
was not even pretty: she had a big nose, a grim little mouth and a frumpy hairdo.
All they seem to have had in common is opportunism combined with a powerful
survival drive.

What these women were about was not sex, but
ostentation. They were themselves, as Dumas observed, 'luxuries for public
consumption, like hounds, horses and carriages'. Pearl, who possessed a sort of
sardonic humour, once had herself served up on a silver platter, naked apart
from some parsley. Consumption was also what they were supposed to die of; the
disease which, mythically, was 'accelerated by venereal excess' and ate the body
from the inside without destroying its beauty (of this quartet, only Duplessis
actually did). Their way of life was based on spending - which is, significantly,
the usual nineteenth-century word for ejaculation. Money rushed through their
hands: because they functioned as advertisements for their protectors'
magnificence, extravagance was almost their principal job. The first fashion
victims, they have significant factors in common with more recent women famous
for being famous. Their profligacy is easily understood by their own consuming
need, which was not for sex or even for love, but for living up to their own
reputations, without which they would disappear back into the obscurity from
which they emerged. They ended up, consequently, with a lifestyle rather than a
life. This is a story which Rounding tells very well.

The funniest parts of the book deal with the
salon of Sabatier, where Thèophile Gautier let his hair down, writing obscene
letters for reading aloud, which are not so much monuments of sophisticated
perversity as a regression to the nursery world of 'pee, po, belly, bum,
drawers'. Tellingly, Sabatier, who had to sit through this stuff and look as if
she liked it, invariably addressed him as 'vous' rather than 'tu'.

Another highlight is the inadvertent
tragicomedy that ensued when this kindly and simple woman, having failed to
realise that when Baudelaire addressed passionate verse to her he required her
to stick to his script and remain sadistically inaccessible, horrified him by
writing back to say that she was his any time he liked.

One thing that Rounding brings out very
clearly is the extent to which these women, as well as being significant
subjects of literature and the visual arts, were part of the commercial life of
Paris as more than just big spenders. La Païva's bath, sculpted out of a single
block of Algerian yellow onyx, received an award at the 1867 Universal
Exposition and, more generally, her great house on the Champs Elysées, now a
listed building, was a showcase for contemporary style. The grandes horizontales
were as famous for putting on clothes as for taking them off. Duplessis and
Sabatier famously stuck to their own styles - Duplessis liked to dress with
perverse simplicity, 'suitable only for a nun or a duchess', while Sabatier
chose to create her own fashions or ask artist friends to design her clothes. A
photograph of Pearl shows her in a crinoline some eight feet in diameter. Both
she and La Païva were also notorious for their use of heavy makeup; La Païva
overdid the kohl, keeping her face white, while Pearl, in keeping with her
chosen surname, pioneered the use of frosted powders. Subtlety was not the name
of the game.

In their own time, as Rounding's many
excellently translated quotations show, these women were both figureheads and
scapegoats for everything which was hard, artificial and commercial in French
society. Now one's sympathy is all on their side, so it is cheerful to discover
that they were not, as legend would have it, beautiful and doomed, with the
exception of Duplessis, whose tuberculosis was more probably the result of the
slogging hard labour of her childhood than of the patisserie and down pillows of
her prosperity. La Païva married a Count, Sabatier enjoyed a modestly prosperous
old age and died of flu at 68 and, though a number of moralists alleged that
Pearl died in abject poverty, in fact she succumbed to cancer at 51 in a
perfectly comfortable three-bedroom flat.

Many questions remain. Rounding can show
nothing of the inner lives of these women, or even whether they had any, since
they are images reflected in a thousand distorting mirrors. La Païva somehow
leaves an impression of powerful, practical intelligence, while Cora Pearl's
energy and humour come through in her memoirs. But why on earth did she want to
learn Volapük?

Being
neither prostitute nor mistress but charging for those services a wife would
give for free, the courtesan is an endlessly troubling figure. The ambivalence
and uncertainty of her role is captured in the two titles by which she was most
commonly known in 19th-century France: the grande horizontale and the
demi-mondaine.

She was a
symbol of decadence, as conspicuous and impertinent as Clésinger's scandalous
statue of Apollonie Sabatier in the Musée D'Orsay, in which she appears
magnificently horizontale, jutting her hips in the throes of orgasm.

But she was
also barely visible, living as she did in the half-world, an exclusive
underground terrain in which, like Eurydice, she was condemned to remain. A
courtesan was a woman who fell from respectability and then rose to great
heights in an alternative realm. She was an exile.

To complete
this transferral from one world to the next a change of name was required, and
the four grandes horizontales whose lives and legends are described by Virginia
Rounding shared between them 15 names, including the titles bestowed on them by
the public.

Marie
Duplessis, whose childlike appearance and early death made her the prototype of
the "modest" courtesan, was born Alphonsine Plessis, became Mme la Comtesse de
Perregaux and was known posthumously as la dame aux camélias after her lover,
Alexandre Dumas fils, portrayed her in his hit play as the saintlike Marguerite
Gautier, who dies of a broken heart. "Compared with the courtesan of today,"
Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote when La Dame aux Camélias was revived in 1868, "and her
monstrous corruption, squalor, language, slang and stupidity, Marguerite
Gautier... seems nothing but a faded engraving of some vague design."

Esther
Pauline Lachmann, the daughter of Russian Jews, was the type of contemporary
courtesan of whom D'Aurevilly most disapproved. Shrewd and determined, she
became known as La Paiva. The ambition and extravagance of La Paiva (whose
husband's title was itself fictitious) were such that even Napoleon III asked to
be shown around her marble, onyx and gold-encrusted palace, built for her by her
lover and future husband, the Count Henckel von Donnersmark. After her death,
Henckel remarried but kept her body in a large jar of embalming fluid, before
which he would weep for hours.

Aglae-Josephine
Savatier, whose more modest home became a salon for Bohemian intellectuals,
including Baudelaire (who was her lover), Flaubert, Delacroix and Saint-Beuve,
became Apollonie Sabatier, thus erasing any association between herself and a "savate",
meaning an old, used slipper. Madame Sabatier was soon dubbed La Presidente, and
such was her status that she received scatological and pornographic letters from
Theophile Gautier.

English-born
Cora Pearl, lover of Prince Napoleon, changed her name "for no particular
reason" from Emma Crouch, but, as Rounding points out, she enjoyed word play and
"the making of herself a gem strung on a chain of lovers". This changing of
names was a form of reinvention but it was also a sign of the times: Louis
Napoleon had adopted the title of Napoleon III, suggesting that one could be
whoever one chose to be.

While
courtesans have traditionally written about themselves as victims of an idle and
hypocritical aristocracy who passed them around like after-dinner mints, they
tend to have been written about in trifling, excitable, blushing terms, as
though they represented no more than the glittering ephemera of a glamourous
bygone age. Susan Griffin's The Book of the Courtesans (2001) and Joanna
Richardson's The Courtesans (reprinted in 2000) idealise their subjects.
Rounding breaks new ground; Grandes Horizontales is a historically precise,
coolly analytical study of the rise and fall of second-empire Paris, a regime
that is treated as inseparable from the dangerous opulence of the demi-monde.

After the
Franco-Prussian war the extravagant lifestyles of the courtesans were blamed for
the ills of France. "The first thought to enter everyone's head," wrote J de
l'Estoile in 1871, "was where all the missing gold had gone." Most, it was
presumed, was adorning the palace of La Paiva. Because Rounding sees courtesans
as a product of economic and political pressure, she avoids the breathless prose
and novelettish narrative that one tends to associate with tales of traviatas
and marquises. "Amid all the glamour of the courtesan," Rounding reminds us,
"there is a tendency to forget that money is being exchanged for sex."

The
courtesan might appear to offer more than just her body: reputation was bought
as well, along with wit, conversation, a good salon, beauty and status, but it
was essentially sex she was selling.

"The actual
nature of the transaction is veiled," Rounding writes; "when a demi-mondaine is
looking for a protector, or even just a client, she is offering a package in
which the sexual act is implicitly included but may be the one thing which is
not overtly displayed."

So La
Presidente advertised her sexuality instead in Clésinger's writhing statue and
La Paiva trumpeted her accomplishments in her marble mansion. Cora Pearl played
cupid in Offenbach's operetta Orphée aux enfers dressed only in strategically
placed diamonds. The demi-mondaine only revealed half of herself, her promise
and her success; this is what makes her so elusive, and thus so desirable.

Rounding is
strong on the role and etiquette of the courtesan's salon and on the details of
her appearance and toilette, but she is as interested in the legends generated
by the grandes horizontales as she is in their lives, and she deftly analyses
the ways in which fact and fiction bleed into one another in the making of a
reputation. While none of her four women knew the others, they knew of one
another, and Rounding shapes her narrative so that each life weaves into the
next, as lovers are shared and others' legends are consumed. This is a rich,
timely, engrossing book that puts its forerunners to shame.

Frances
Wilson's biography of the Regency courtesan Harriette Wilson will be published
by Faber in the autumn.

Pretty woman

Camille - the first tart
with a heart - has inspired countless plays and films. But her life, says Lyn
Gardner, was far from romantic

Lyn
GardnerWednesday March 5, 2003The Guardian

On
February 5 1847, the prostitute known as Marie Duplessis, once queen of the
Parisian demi-monde and arguably one of the modern world's first celebrities,
died of tuberculosis. She was only 23. Within weeks, all her belongings,
including her pet parrot, were auctioned to pay her massive debts. Fashionable
Paris turned out in force, most not to bid but merely to stare. Charles Dickens
was among the throng, later commenting: "One could have believed that Marie was
Jeanne d'Arc or some other national heroine, so profound was the general sadness."
A myth was beginning to take shape.

Within
the year it emerged, fully formed, in the novel La Dame aux Camélias by
Alexandre Dumas the younger, the illegitimate son of the author of The Three
Musketeers. In the novel, Dumas, who had had an affair with Marie Duplessis
between September 1844 and August 1845, transforms himself into Armand Duval and
Marie Duplessis into Marguerite Gautier. The consumptive Marguerite is the
original tart with an enormous heart, who gives up her young lover Armand, the
only man she has ever loved, at the behest of his father, who argues that the
family's spotless reputation is being destroyed by the scandal of the liaison.
Marguerite's self-sacrifice is the death of her. Not since Romeo and Juliet had
romantic myth offered an opportunity for such a good cry: a minimum of five
hankies was required to make it through to the end of the novel.

But
people didn't read it as romantic myth. The book's enormous success came about
partly because many people read the fiction as fact. Dumas's affair with
Duplessis had been an open secret in fashionable Paris.
Operating at that suspect but lucrative crossroads where legend and truth
converge, the novel became a runaway hit.

But
just as his hero Duval could not let his lover rest, and exhumed her rotting
corpse a year after her death, nor could Dumas. With indecent haste he turned
his novel into a money-spinning play. La Dame aux Camélias had its premiere at
the Théatre de Vaudeville on February 2 1852. It would have been sooner if the
censor had not rejected it three times, considering the subject matter
indelicate. It was almost five years to the day since Duplessis's death.

In
Dumas's play, Marguerite dies in the arms of her lover, who returns to her at
the 11th hour, giving rise to one of the longest, most popular and potentially
camp deathbed scenes in the history of drama. "I have lived for love and now I
am dying of it," cries Marguerite. With the success of La Dame aux Camélias,
which became known as Camille in the English-speaking world, Marie Duplessis
became trapped for ever in a romantic myth. When Verdi's opera La Traviata
premiered a year later, with Marie/Marguerite rechristened as Violetta, the
chains were fastened even more tightly.

The
trouble with myths is that they are lies. The real Marie Duplessis (born
Alphonsine Plessis) may have dazzled Paris for a few brief years, but her life
was nasty, brutish and short. She did not expire coughing prettily in the arms
of her beloved, but alone after years of disease and three days of agony.
Reputedly sold into prostitution by her father in her early teenage years, Marie
had made her way to
Paris by the time she
was 15 and reinvented herself as a well-paid courtesan.

It must
have seemed like a canny move for the former Normandy
peasant girl, but it meant Marie was no longer mistress of her time, her body or
even her heart. She was a working girl, at the beck and call of the men who
bought her - victim of a creeping disease that ravaged her youth, beauty and
health, and a society that tolerated her as long as she remained at its margins.
The adding of "Du" to her surname was a pathetic attempt to give herself
aristocratic status. When she died, she was surrounded by the trappings of
wealth and status, but in reality she owned nothing but debts.

Like
the vultures who turned up at the auction to pick over her remaining possessions,
Dumas picked over the bones of her life and turned them into a meal ticket. Much
of the rest of his life was devoted to writing books and plays that decried
prostitution and upheld the sanctity of the family.

His
stage version of Camille became an enduring success. Tragic actresses in the
19th century queued up to play Marguerite, and the role became as coveted as any
of the great Shakespearean heroines. It was one of Sarah Bernhardt's greatest
stage successes, and she repeated the role on film in 1912 - perhaps unwisely,
as she was aged 68 at the time. Rudolf Valentino played Armand Duval in a 1920
movie version opposite Alla Nazimova, and Greta Garbo won an Oscar nomination
for her 1936 portrayal of Marguerite in which her death is famously signalled by
a remarkable long close-up shot that simply fades to darkness, an absence.

Even
now, the story retains its appeal, constantly reappearing in different versions.
In the theatre these have included Pam Gems's feminist but still strongly
romantic reading of the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-1980s,
and Charles Ludlum's high-camp 1973 version for his Ridiculous Theatre Company -
a production that held new meanings on its 1990 revival, three years after the
death of its author from Aids. This week a new version of Camille by Neil
Bartlett opens at London's Lyric Hammersmith.

Cinema,
meanwhile, has brought us Pretty Woman, interesting because in this instance
prostitution is the disease, and because it offers a happy-ever-after ending. (Notably,
Julia Roberts's unhappy hooker proves her genuine worthiness for true love to
Richard Gere's uncharming Prince Charming, a multi-millionaire businessman, by
weeping all the way through a performance of La Traviata.) More recently, Baz
Luhrmann transposed the story to fin-de-siècle Paris with the all-singing
all-dancing Moulin Rouge, in which Nicole Kidman's nightclub singer Satine comes
prettily kitted out with consumption.

The
appeal of the story to a 19th-century audience is understandable. After all, the
rules were clear for 19th-century romantic heroines: whether you were Marguerite,
Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, death was where your story inevitably led. There
would be no happy-ever-afters for these Cinderellas, but death could bring
redemption. In the case of Marguerite, her illness signifies that she is full of
moral decay, but it is also part of her attractiveness and wins sympathy from
the audience. (Consumption, with its pallor and glittering-eyed fever, was so
identified with an ideal of female beauty that young women would attempt to
mimic its symptoms, even going so far as to starve themselves or eat sand.) But
you can't go on coughing charmingly for ever - some would argue that
Marguerite's dying is drawn out far too long as it is - and in the end death is
her only option. It is only in death that Marguerite can become a virgin again.

What is
less clear is why this story retains its hold over us today. After all, we no
longer believe in virgins. Nor do we believe that tuberculosis is caused by
living too fast or is a sign of moral decay; we know that it is caused by a
bacillus that thrives in conditions of overcrowding and poverty. We know it is
not a pretty illness but a dangerous one that is on the rise. And what is the
point of redemption if you don't believe in God?

In
Camille, Marguerite must die so that Armand's sister can become a respectable
bourgeois matron. Looked at in that light, Marguerite's sacrifice is not worth
making. She dies so that young men like Armand can go on sowing their oats. She
dies so we can go on believing in romantic myths, even though we know they are
not true. She dies without protest and she dies too soon. What we need is a
Marguerite who dies shrieking loudly - or doesn't die at all.